The Lord says, "I will give you back what you lost to the swarming locusts, the hopping locusts, the stripping locusts, and the cutting locusts. It was I who sent this great destroying army against you. Once again you will have all the food you want, and you will praise the Lord your God, who does these miracles for you. Never again will my people be disgraced. Then you will know that I am among my people Israel, that I am the Lord your God, and there is no other. Never again will my people be disgraced. Then, after doing all those things, I will pour out my Spirit upon all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your old men will dream dreams, and your young men will see visions."
Joel 2:25-28 (New Living Translation)
At a wedding shower held at my first pastoral appointment at Granbury FUMC, Carol Davis gifted Joel and myself a gorgeous cream on cream king-sized hand stitched quilt. It lived on our bed for many years until we bought our RV. Because Carol and her husband were RVers, I knew she would approve of the move to our home on wheels.
After Granbury, I was appointed to Valley Mills FUMC & Cayote (Kay-Oat) UMCs. I served those two churches in Bosque County for three years, and during that time I decided I would like to learn to quilt. So, I began to sit with the women of the Cayote church once a month or so in their community center where they would assemble a big frame and sit around and hand quilt. There was always a potluck to which I never brought a dish, but felt free to indulge in country home cooking. I never got very good at quilting, and my big, uneven stitches were no match for the capable, aged hands of women who had learned the craft around the same frame from other church ladies six decades previously. On my last Saturday night as the pastor of the Cayote church, Joel & I gathered with those saints in the community center and those ladies presented me with a handmade quilt in purple and turquoise (my two favorite colors). I'm sure you've seen the pattern...blocks and blocks of a little prairie girl whose face is hidden by a bonnet.
When we moved from the Lorena church to the Ovilla church, I packed up that quilt and another bedspread...never to see them again. When I realized what I had lost, what I could never get back, well...Joel and I both cried. Over the years, we speculated about how those items didn't make the move. Joel growing up a preacher's kid, and it being our fourth move as a clergy couple, we knew that in every pastoral move...something gets lost or broken. Ask any clergy family, it's inevitable.
It's also inevitable for every clergy family that serving the church is a wonderful joy and sometimes a bitter blessing. In your obedience to follow God's will & provide visionary, prophetic leadership to the church God is calling you to serve, you will experience someone in the church not agreeing with you, not liking you, and sometimes campaigning against you behind (or in front of) your back. Clergy are no stranger to the idea of interference, of giving up something of yourself for the good of the church. For the good of God's kingdom. Perhaps that is why I have always liked the passage from the prophet (not my husband) Joel. We preachers know something of the swarming locusts, the hopping locusts, the stripping locusts, and the cutting locusts. Losing that Cayote quilt was a physical reminder of all we have, and maybe and will lose.
As the pastor's spouse at Ovilla UMC, I again sat with the quilting ladies and tried to learn to quilt. I again sat and hand-stitched a quilt that was sold at their Lord's Acre Auction. You can imagine my surprise when one of the quilting ladies paid an exorbitant amount of money to buy the quilt. And then Cheryl Sullivan walked up and gifted it to me saying, "You should own the first quilt you ever hand quilted." I told Cheryl the story of the lost Cayote quilt, and we both cried. And from time to time I find my long, uneven stitches on that quilt next to everyone else's tiny, straight stitches and know that God restores what the locusts eat.
Lay people experience the same kind of loss. My oldest-I call her my oldest friend, but really what I mean is the friend I've kept the longest (we met when we were 14)-my most continual friend, Robyn Harris, lost her mom to a sudden heart attack when she was in her twenties. When her dad, JIm, began to go through Ruth's things, he found some unfinished quilt tops. He took the quilt tops to the quilting ladies at their home church, FUMC Grapevine, and asked them to finish the quilts so he could give them to Ruth's four children. There he was, after having experienced swarming, hopping, stripping, and cutting locusts...standing there with the pieces of quilts in his hands...and those good church ladies told him no. No, they wouldn't assemble those quilts for them. But they did tell him they would teach him to quilt. And so every time those ladies at FUMC Grapevine met, there was Jim Garvin. Together, they restored what the locusts had eaten.
This year, when we moved from Ovilla to Fort Worth for new pastoral appointments, I sent out my grandmother's Lane cedar chest that was given to her as a gift when she got married (now almost 100 years old)...I sent that chest out to be refinished for our new home. Some time ago, Joel had locked the key to the chest INSIDE the chest...so we asked the refinisher to unlock the chest and find the key. When the refinisher called to set up a time to deliver the newly restored piece he said, "Oh, I found a quilt in there when I got the key out." My heart thumped in my chest. I asked, "Oh, what kind of a quilt?" He said, "Well, it's not as old as the chest. In fact, it looks pretty new." You guessed it...somewhere along the way my purple and turquoise Cayote quilt had been safely stored by me in my grandmother's cedar chest. Joel locked the key inside and we moved that chest with us throughout all of those moves, Cayote quilt intact. Amidst the cold of the 100 year historic Texas winter storm, I covered my kids and I with that quilt to keep warm when our power was out.
I don't know a lot about the prophet Joel, or locusts, or some of the problematic verses in the text I cited above. I guess all I really do know is that when God wants to restore something the locusts have eaten, he's probably going to use a quilting group from a church. Those ladies (and sometimes gentlemen) can take scraps and make art. God can do that with your life, too...give God what the locusts have eaten and see what he restores.
Written By: Christie Robbins